St. Landry democrat., 1887-01-22
WOMEN IN BUSINESS.
Gail Hami1ton's idea of Their Trials In
This WOrkaday World.

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When woman has to concern herself
with the material necessities of life she
descends from higher plane thar
man. She is often forced to descend
She must often stoop to conquer. HUI
mainly has made immense strides since
it was first heard of, but it has great
way yet to 60 before it reaches the re-
pose of perfect harmony and crowns a
finished world. The angel in man has
fatally bruised the head of the brute in
man, but the brute still bites at the
heel of the angel. AS between the an
gel and the brute I think our country
leads the world. The unquestionable
claim of woman, the Difference due to
woman, the sacredness Of her physical
inferiority and of her spiritual super
iority, are not only a commanding in
stinct but clearly defined idea in Amer
lean manhood. A thousand violations
on the part of both men and women do
not annihilate this fact. Thousands Of
women earning their own living, thou
sands of wives working harder than
self-supporting maidens, thousands Of
both doing their work with or without
protest, nay, even with rejoicing, do
not affect the fact. Even America, adj
vanced as it is, has not reached the
ideal life. 1t is much that we have
reached a point where we can catch
glimpses of the Promised Land.
At first sight it seems idle to say to
women who are wearing themselves
out in doing work that should be dona
by servants, or to world in which q
large part of the household work NOT
only, but of outside work as well, is
done by women, that ultimately and
ideally they ought not to work at all.
But in any comparison of their effectiv-
ness with that of men, it certainly
should never be forgotten, it should
always be kept well in sight, that how
ever unsuccessful their efforts be, it is
in a field which they are not made to
cultivate. 1t is better that tTay culti-
vate that field than that they be idle in
their own, or that they starve in their
neighbors'. Many women are not
sufficiently developed to discern their
own peculiar work. Without discern
ing it they do great deal of it instinc-
lively in the lower fields where they
are forced to live, but from which they
will one day be graduated. But always
it should be he held up on all sides to
the light that woman's real work is on
character, her surest weapon is
influence. She can buy and sell,
and cook and sew, and wash
and iron, because she ia
still of the earth earthly; but she can
not do it so well as man because she
is not so much of an earth creature az
he. AS a matter of fact, even in this
favored country, where men pay to
women, as women, not as ladies, or
bellies, or beauties, an extraordinary
Difference, the mass of wives work az
hard as the mass of husbands. Their
spiritual superiority is signified chiefly
In this-that the women work for love,
the men for money. The spiritual adj
vance made by man is seen chiefly in
this, that so much of the money he
earns goes to the ministry of refine
ment, education, embellishments, to the
wife and children whom he loves. But
the woman sees no money for her toll.
Her sufficient, her ample reward is in
husband, content, happy, growing in
grace; in children, bounding to gra-
cious maturity. The unmarried woman
works for necessity, for love of her de-
rorIarf
beautiful or benefcent profession, for
sweet mercy and charity to the ig-
for horror of dependence upon
those on whom she has no claim-sel-
dom for business, ambition or material
accumulation. The woman who fails
in her business is not necessarily the
woman who sinks beneath the toll of
the kitchen, or who pricks her life out
with the needle, or who can not make
both ends meet in a dry goods establish.
ment or milliner's shop. Such wo-
man fails in mans business, not in her
own. The woman who makes a real
failure, a failure in her own business, is
the unloved woman, the ungracious
woman, the grasping, the selfish, the
repressive, the unsympathizing, the GEN.
serious, the untruthful, the woman who
is a centre of discomfort, a source of
an object of avoidance, instead
of being that gentle, consoling, consid-
crate, motherly magnet which draws
unto itself all human want, and woe,
and bliss, and aspiration.-N. 7. World.